After over a year of work, the Orsanmichele Museum reopens. It was closed for 400 days, due to restoration, safety measures, rearrangement of the museum and improvement of the accesses.

The Orsanmichele Complex comes back with a new display where the 13 original statues exhibited in the Museum – the work of the greatest sculptors of the Florentine Renaissance, namely Lorenzo Ghiberti (St. John the Baptist, St. Stephen and St. Matthew), Donatello (St. Mark and St. Peter), Nanni di Banco (St. Eligio, Saint Philip, Four Crowned Saints), Andrea del Verrocchio (Disbelief of Saint Thomas), Baccio da Montelupo (Saint John the Evangelist), Giambologna (Saint Luke), alongside the fourteenth-century ones Piero di Giovanni Tedesco (Madonna della Rosa) and Niccolò by Pietro Lamberti (San Giacomo Maggiore) – return to interact with the public, as when they found themselves in the external niches and met the gaze of passers-by in the streets surrounding Orsanmichele.

Other than the works of art themselves, the public will be able to notice the works that undertook a substantial series of restoration and extraordinary maintenance operations on the sculptures, wall paintings, stone vestments of the Church and some of the famous statues preserved in the Museum, in addition to the creation of supports for the safety of the works.

Restoration in church

In the apse part of the church, most of the walls were restored, thanks to the cleaning of the columns at the base of the large three-lancet windows and the restoration of the infill plaster; furthermore, thanks to the removal of the old sacristy against the north-east wall, replaced today by a new wardrobe structure detached from the wall, some portions of the frescoes depicting San Domenico and San Francesco have become visible again, on which it was necessary to intervene with a restoration . The paintings on the faces of the three pillars, depicting Saint John the Evangelist, Saint Barnabas and Saint Peter, got a significant recovery.

A complete dusting of the of the Orcagna tabernacle was also made, as well as of the altar with the group of the Virgin with Child and Saint Anne by Francesco da Sangallo, and of the panel by Bernardo Daddi, the latter subjected to a methodical control of the state of conservation.

The Orsanmichele Museum can be visited every day, except for Tuesdays. For tickets and reservations, write to our front desk: info@tornabuoni1.com.